Samsung 970 EVO Review (500GB)

The New M.2 NVMe Price/Performance Champ

Nearly two years ago, Samsung launched their Samsung 960 PRO and 960 EVO to major fanfare. These two juggernaut introductions in addition to their enterprise cousins further established Samsung’s position as the undisputed leader in M.2 form-factor NVMe SSDs. At the time, the industry had been facing a massive shortage of NAND which slowed down product introductions across the board, but as NAND supply has finally begun stabilizing, companies are now finally introducing some new products to once again reignite demand.

Recently, Samsung launched the Samsung 970 EVO and the Samsung 970 PRO which will replace the aging Samsung 960 [...]

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October 18, 2017

Microsoft Announces Surface Book 2

Microsoft released the update Surface Book 2 in a surprise announcement this morning, bringing some much needed specs upgrade to the almost archaic Surface Book.

The new Surface Book 2 is now equipped with Intel’s 7th/8th Gen dual-core and quad-core CPUs. Graphics have been boosted to either the integrated Intel UHD 620, or discrete Nvidia GTX 1050 and GTX 1060 for the higher end models. RAM and storage options remain unchanged with options up to 16GB of LPDDR3 and up to a 1TB NVME PCIe SSD.

Both the 13″ and 15″ model carries the always-sexy PixelSense display with a pixel density of 267ppi for the 13″ model and 260ppi for the 15″ [...]

The Razer Blade Stealth laptop now uses Intel’s Core i7-8550U quad-core mobile CPU. Despite being a quad-core part, the i7-8550U has the same TDP as the previous generation dual-core mobile CPUs. This enables it to be fitted into thinner devices all the while doubling the thread count. Users can expect vastly improved multi-threaded and multi-tasking performance with excellent battery life.

Other aspects of the hardware remain unchanged. The Razer Blade Stealth still features a 13.3″ QHD IGZO [...]

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October 2, 2017

AMD Brings Bootable NVMe RAID to Threadripper Via Software Update

In a blog post today, AMD announced support for native bootable NVMe RAID for its x399 HEDT platform.

Now you may ask, what does NVMe RAID bring to the table? Well, AMD highlighted some performance gains in RAID 0 with six NVMe SSDs connected, showcasing a whopping 21.221GB/s sequential read speed and 11.532GB sequential write speeds. Performance scaling is shown to be almost close to linear.

To add the capability, simply update your BIOS for your motherboard and install the latest RAID driver package here. The driver package includes an easy to use GUI software to help you guide though setting up a new RAID array once it detects that you have multiple [...]

For FMS 2017, Seagate made a slew of new announcements including a new 64TB NVMe PCIe SSD, updates to the Nytro SSD lineup, a new RealStor storage appliance, and Nytro Q-Boost technology.

When Seagate announced their 60TB SAS SSD last year, it was an impressive feat however, Seagate and its partners quickly realized that there were limited use cases for the SSD. The capacity was simply too large for the relatively performance limited SAS interface.

For 2017, Seagate went back to the drawing board and announced a new 64TB NVMe SSD which is simply a full height, half-length form factor add-in card containing eight M.2 22110 PCIe Gen 3 x4 SSDs.

Using [...]

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August 10, 2017

Corsair Launches Neutron NX500 NVMe PCIe SSD

After the successful release of the Force MP500 PCIe SSD earlier this year, Corsair is adding another PCIe SSD to the mix with the new Corsair Neutron NX500.

The new SSD will be available in capacities of 400GB, 800GB, and 1600GB will come in an HHHL form factor and feature support for NVMe over a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. Performance of the Neutron NX500 is rated at up to 3,000/2,400 MB/s sequential reads/writes and 300K/270K IOPS 4K random reads/writes. The NX500 will also feature MLC NAND for greater performance and reliability compared to TLC NAND.

The Corsair NX500 400GB and 800GB capacity drives are now available with the 1,600GB capacity drive available [...]

For FMS 2017, Samsung shared several new releases along with its SSD/NAND flash roadmap for the coming years. Among the new releases include Samsung’s 96-Layer QLC (Quad Level Cell) NAND and a few new enterprise SSDs.

64-Layer 3D V-NAND Transition

Samsung is already transitioning its entire line of products to utilize 4th Generation 64-layer 3D V-NAND. Their 64-Layer 3D V-NAND has been in mass production since June of this year and promises to be 30% faster, 30% more power efficient, and 20% more reliable than previous generation 48-layer 3D V-NAND.

This could potentially mean that Samsung’s successor to the 960 Pro and 960 Evo [...]

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August 5, 2017

PNY Unveils Prevail Pro Mobile Workstation at SIGGRAPH 2017

At SIGGRAPH 2017, PNY announced that they’ll soon be jumping into the mobile workstation market with their latest PNY Prevail Pro P3000 and Prevail Pro P4000 mobile workstations.

The new mobile workstations which are just 0.78-inches thin and weigh in at just 4.8Lbs, feature up to a 15.6-inch 4K UHD(3840×2160) display, an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor, up to 32GB of DDR4 2400MHz RAM, and Nvidia’s Quadro Mobile P3000 for the Prevail Pro P3000 and the Quadro Mobile P4000 (Max-Q) for the Prevail Pro P4000. Storage options include up to 512GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs and up to a 2TB HDD.

Dell announced a massive refresh of its Precision line of workstations at SIGGRAPH 2017, marking the first refresh of the Precision lineup in five years.

Since it’s the 20 year anniversary for Dell’s workstation business, it’s only fitting to talk about Dell’s first workstation and to see how far they’ve come in the 20 years. Dell’s first workstation was the WorkStation 400, which came in a beige box packed with either one or two Intel Penium II processors running at either 266 MHz, 300 MHz or 333 MHz. The system took as much as 512 MB of RAM and ran Windows NT. In 1997, this was absolutely cutting edge [...]

Dell showed off an entire array of new lineup of Skylake-W and Skylake-SP servers at SIGGRAPH 2017 which we’ll be covering soon, but before that, we wanted to share a few of the docking solutions and adapters for PCIe NVMe SSDs that caught our eye.

The first is a hot swappable M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD dock which is the first time we’ve seen such a solution. Designed for Dell Precision workstation users who want to be able to take full advantage of NVMe PCIe SSD storage, but also want to be able to take it on the go, Dell’s M.2 hot swap dock includes a compact hot swap tray for M.2 SSDs which allow the hot swap [...]